NGN Members Meeting at 14th of February 2002 in Brussels

The keynote speech came from ETSI from Mr. Alistair Urie to explain their own project of NGN and their current status and the future. The ETSI founded also a group with the name Next Generation Networks (NGN).

Their objectices are:

The framework is named TIPHON. NGN works also on end-to-end QoS:

Partners are ATM Forum, IETF (megaco, sip) etc. NGN works on service platforms which should concentrate on:

NGN-SG reports are available under the URL address http://www.etsi.org/ngn An ETSI workshop for QoS at 28.02.-01.03.02 will take place in Munich. Find more under http://www.etsi.org/qosworkshop NGN in ETSI main role is to make standards. NGN main role in European Commission is to develop new roadmaps for developing new technologies.

At this meeting the NGN Roadmap 2002 Framework was also presented for the NGNI members. Above 50 companies working in NGNI now. This presentation explains the working direction for all members. NGNI is a project in the IST programme to facilitate consensus building the topics and issues which will shape NGN. A Themantic Network willing include, as members, industries, operators, and research institutes which wish to contribute to shape the network of the future.

The expected results are

A technology roadmap is an extended look at the future of a chosen field of inquiry composed from the collective knowledge and imagination of the brightest drivers of change in that field. Product roadmaps are industrial property of a particular company, which take no account of any specific product. It presents an overview of developments and market trends and define a version and its challenges for a particular field and are for public dissemination. Product benchmarking compares various features of competing products of different brands. Here you compares products with the state of the art and identifies markets and players in the field. Joint contributions to standard to support a particular viewpoint are standard bodies (e.g. ETSI), specification organisations (e.g. IETF), and fora (ATM Forum). The project NGNI is 100% funded by the EU! The budget is about 1.5 Mio. Euro for 2 years. The project started at the 1st January 2001. During the first part of the project there were built up a secretariat, a critical mass of members from whom experts can be found to define technical achievements, and "activities" (means the different projects).

The future work will be from a bottom-up to a top-down approach (from collecting information to structuring it) based on three NGNI tools: road mapping, benchmarking, and standards. Furthermore there will be a collective dissemination of the results.

The objectives of this member meeting are:

Afterwards the Technical Session took place. All activities of the frameworks were presented. Some remarks of the reviewers were regarding the Access Network, that they are missing a vision. The framework has to find out what is relevant for the roadmap! Regarding IPv6 QoS and MM applications was the remark that they should focussing their work on IP-QoS. The framework New Services got no remark regarding their work. Only a positive resonance regarding the vision workshop to find out user requirements. The Optical Core and Metro Networks framework got none remarks, because that project begun at January and there are no results available now. The framework IPv6 Interoperability Testing is an proposed project for NGNI. They want to improve the IPv6 stacks and developing benchmarks for analysing the tests, IPv6 conformance and interoperability,and developing test environments/platforms. Participation at ETSI and IETF to find out new draft standards at interoperability events is: http://www.etsi.org/plugtests/04History/2001_IPv6.html. Remarks came also here from the reviewers that the focus of NGNI is not to developing of test suites, but you need tests of new protocols to find out the real problems if you want to deploy IPv6 and give the results back to the standardisation bodies!

The Session 2 of approved projects includes NGN Management and Content Management. The project INTERMON will start in April 2002. The Intra-Domän QoS for the development of end-to-end monitoring of QoS is one main goal. The consortium is coming from the AQUILLA project. They want to take part into the NGNI. Regarding the content management, another project is also dealing with benchmarking and is submitted. They want to optimise the use of internal network resources. Virtual server keeps changing as the session evolves. Pre-distribution strategy for content in the network will be available. Agent-based protocols will be developed. That project is not relevant for NGNI!

In Session 3 of new proposals the project VoIP as an NGN Service has been presented. 8 members are interested in to work within the project, but only 4-5 members are allowed. But, only a few pages draft exist and has to extend to a full deliverable. Another proposal regarding Next Generation Service Platforms arised. They want to get solutions for NG service provisioning. The promotion of the delivery of NGN Service Platforms is the main goal. The benchmarking of technologies (programmability, provisioning of new services etc.) are one key point. The roadmap describes Service Creation Platform, Service Programming in an NGN context. Main remark was that only Telecoms are involved in such a project and not partners from other business areas. A further proposal regarding IPv6 and NGN was presented.IPv6 would be an integral part of the NGN. The needs for 3G and NGN are the same. They want to developing benchmarks, guidelines, and identify key areas for standardisation, too.

The NGNI plans for 2002 were the last session at this day. The comments regarding the progress of the project from the Commission and the reviewers were:

After all they mentioned that NGNI makes its work very well and the results of the deliverables are fine.